Would squeaky clean detective fiction be too true to be good?
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Version 0 of 1. We're all familiar with the classic noir detective – fresh-faced, clean living and teetotal, with his wholesome family life and penchant for golf and the Sunday roast … oh, wait a minute. That's not Sam Spade at all, is it? And it certainly isn't Philip Marlowe, or John Rebus, or VI Warshawski (who manages to be twice as hardboiled as her male counterparts). It's what we expect of the modern detective: a solitary, whisky-swilling wolf, with a chip on the shoulder as big as a .38 and nights spent alone on a sofa that one suspects is covered in stains. Even when they are married, divorce isn't long in coming, and sometimes the wife – it usually is a wife – is never even seen (Mrs Gene Hunt, we're looking at you. Or not, actually). It's usually literary critics and not the actual law who take issue with this sort of problem, but this week Nick Gargan, Avon and Somerset's chief constable, called for more fictional portrayals of less disreputable, corrupt cops. Gargan says that he accepts Rebus creator Ian Rankin's view that a novel that actually followed police procedure would be exceedingly dull, but he worries about the impact that fictional coppers have on the real article and wishes they were depicted in a more realistic way. Why aren't they? It may be that crime writers feel that police officers are more susceptible to psychological damage, being in a high-stress profession, but is that any more realistic? I've written a detective series myself, set in an imaginary, and slightly futuristic, Chinese city. The novels have an extremely tenuous relationship with the real world, since the hero is the city's liaison officer between heaven and hell and ends up with a sidekick who is a demon. However, it has its roots in reality – and the novels' protagonist came about because I'd grown tired, in the mid-90s, of the hard-boiled lone wolf hero and wanted to portray a detective who was a family man, reasonably psychologically sound, who would rather read a book than go drinking. The Chen series is fantasy with a bit of science fiction, as well as crime, but I think that Gargan has a point about more mainstream detective fiction. Quite apart from anything else, I have quite a bit to do with Avon and Somerset police in a bureaucratic capacity, and they don't tend to go around in trenchcoats speaking out of the sides of their mouths. But what of Rankin's point about boredom? You can, I think, have a quiet and steady protagonist and not run the risk of terminal dullness as long as exciting things happen to them and around them, and crime is the ideal genre for making this come about. You don't have to sacrifice a stable hero or heroine for the sake of your plot. The Midsomer villages probably have a higher body count than 1920s Chicago, but Barnaby (both of them) is happily married: the cunning author will use this in itself as a source of plot tension, as the detective's family comes under potential threat from sundry villains. And readers of the classic murder mystery seem to like the change of pace between bloody death and a nice cup of tea back at the cottage. The chief constable has a point, though, illustrated by what the Americans call the less downbeat and urban kind of murder: the "English cosy". Only in the English countryside could violent death remain something that is "cosy". |